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I’ve dreamed about them before, but this time I didn’t make it to any actual music. Or create any of my own. The daytime outdoor concert was just starting and presumably the band was prepping their appearance from behind a large white curtain on the stage. Drumming began as shadowy images were projected onto it, reminiscent of the puppetry in that Gong Li movie I stayed up late to get through a few weeks ago, and the sticks formed to spell out their name. The spiraling “E” in the center they couldn’t get right so it was obviously animated from a film; in fact, a montage of archival footage featuring each member performing took over the light show. Then the crowd’s attention was turned to a scene in the quiet countryside, where someone was having a spoken argument with his mother but to the same back-and-forth lyrics from “Uncontrollable Urge”.

While I’m doing the Devo, I might as well look up an old track that’s been at the back of my mind—in a box in the bottom of my storage, same difference—Mecha-Mania Boy, which, as I recall, came only on a nondescript 45 from Sound Warehouse. Back then the only repositories of subculture were those we carried around in our heads and compared only with kindred fans at record conventions, so coming across an off-album B-side was like discovering alternate-universe baseball cards. But even today there’s disagreement over whether the lyrics say “now he wants to know your little mistakes” (by far the more profligated version, copied and pasted complete with spelling error, and laughably transcribed) and “now he wants to know your unit’s name.” I liked it because it sounded like every other song on Freedom of Choice, yet maintained their trademark postmodern sensibility for that transition to New Traditionalists.

Tagged music, retro